Apple Intelligence Is Coming to China in December With iOS 27.3 — But the New Siri AI Is Staying Out

Apple will open developer testing of Apple Intelligence in China on November 4 and is targeting a public release with iOS 27.3 in December, the company announced on October 31. The newer Siri AI is excluded from the initial rollout. The December date is a target, not a confirmed day — Apple has not named one — and November 4 is a testing date, not general availability.

Qwen handles selected requests, with permission

Alibaba will supply Qwen access within Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. The integration is optional: users choose when to invoke Qwen and which material to share. Siri can send it selected questions, photos and documents; Writing Tools gains a Compose option, while Visual Intelligence adds an Ask Qwen choice. Alibaba says permission is requested before any question, document or image is sent, and that requests and generated responses will not train its models. Users can sign in through Apple or with a Qwen app account. Apple says its own models drive the core system, and Qwen expands selected requests within the three named features. The release also includes rewriting, proofreading, photo cleanup and notification summaries.

Who gets it, and the language limits

Phone eligibility reaches back to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, released in September 2023 — those devices will be more than three years old at the planned December launch. The standard iPhone 15 and 15 Plus are absent from Apple's compatibility list. The list also includes the iPhone 16 family and later models, iPhone Air and iPhone Duo. Both the device and Siri must use English or Simplified Chinese, and individual features retain their own language and regional limits. The translation offer also differs by app: Dutch, Turkish and Vietnamese appear in Apple's Messages support list, but are absent from its Phone and FaceTime lists, and voice translation is limited to one-to-one calls. Phone and FaceTime support Mandarin, English, French, German and Italian, as well as Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. The new timetable follows an earlier October testing window described by Apple executive chairman Tim Cook in an October 15 interview; the November date supersedes that indication.

Sources

• Bez Kabli — Apple sets China iPhone AI beta for November 4, without Siri AI